Arbitration Forums, (AF) Inc. is the largest U.S. provider of arbitration and subrogation services. AF has a membership of over 4,700 insurers and self-insured organizations who utilize the services of highly trained arbitrators to support their recovery and resolution needs. Annually, AF members file over 510,000 arbitration disputes and 770,000 subrogation demands collectively worth over $5.5 billion in claims.

The job of maintaining all of AF’s backend information systems used by member organizations and AF internal staff belongs to AF’s IT Operations group headed by manager Eric Tuley. Ably assisting Tuley with responsibility across all desktop refresh projects is IT systems engineer, Victor Franklin. As far back as 2012, Tuley and Franklin began exploring the potential for non-persistent VMware Horizon View desktop virtualization to manage desktops more efficiently and reduce the amount of time spent on patching, maintenance, upgrading and troubleshooting their desktop environment.

“Knowing that we planned to leverage non-persistent linked clones, it was critical that we got the right user profile management software,” said Tuley. “We looked at a number of solutions to manage user profiles, but most of them fell short of our requirements. It was only when we looked at Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity that it all fell into place for us.”

Unlike other solutions they evaluated, ProfileUnity addressed some very specific requirements in terms of handling Microsoft application data, Internet favorites and other user customizations, as well as a need to lock down and control the desktops from a central control panel standpoint.

The initial project was to virtualize AF’s member-facing Call Center but since then Franklin and the Technical Support staff have rolled out virtual desktops to AF’s accounting department as well as the executive team. In addition, internal VMware Horizon View pools support the development efforts of the configuration management team, who act a liaison between the IT Operations staff and the application development team. Now Franklin is heading a project to roll out Horizon View virtual desktops for its remote staff of roughly 60 Regional Field Arbitration Managers (FAMs) who login to a central AF “Hub” to record detailed accounts of demands and responses in secure electronic document sharing.

Another major boon to the security initiative from the move to virtual desktops is enhanced fail-over protection from the main data center in Tampa, FL, to a secondary mirrored site in Charlotte, NC.

“To know that, with ProfileUnity, I have all my user profiles on a virtual file server that is SRM protected, and to know that those profiles are portable and available in a Disaster Recovery scenario due to the way that we can configure them with this solution is just invaluable,” said Tuley, who not only spearheaded the DR plan but thoroughly tested it to ensure that AF desktop systems could be recovered within a four-hour timespan.

At the end of the day, Tuley and Franklin give Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity high marks for enabling their desktop virtualization investment to pay back the organization on so many levels.

“I will definitively state that ProfileUnity allowed our View deployment to be easier and a lot faster,” said Tuley, who adds, “That is a huge consideration for me when I have a team of highly compensated staff who have a lot of other demanding work they must do. We really feared that we would be putting months and months into the View deployment, but once we got the profiles figured out with ProfileUnity, it all worked smoothly from there.”